Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform by Terry Scarborough

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform by Terry Scarborough Michelle Allen-Emerson (bio) Terry Scarborough. Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform. Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2021. Pp. xxvii + 165. £75.00. ISBN 978-1-911454-96-0 (hb). In "The Two Dog-Shows," appearing in All the Year Round in August, 1862, the anonymous author seizes on the remarkable contrast between the pampered pooches at the Islington dog show and the abandoned creatures at the relatively new institution, the Lost Dogs Home in Holloway: "At the Islington dog-show all was prosperity. Here, all is adversity. There, the exhibited animals were highly valued, and had all their lives been well fed, well housed, carefully watched. Here, for the most part, the poor things had been half-starved and houseless" ("Two Dog-Shows" 495). The article, while it genuinely admires the charitable work of the Lost Dogs Home, seems to have something else on its mind–the social and class divisions of human life which were a marked feature of the nineteenth-century city. As explained in the recent book The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain (Worboys et al.), this figurative use of animals to engage in discourses about human social relations was quite common in the nineteenth century, a symptom of the erosion of boundaries between animal and human that had begun the century before. Terry Scarborough takes this idea as his starting assumption in Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform. Scarborough explores the rhetorical function of animals in Dickens with a specific focus on their role in shaping attitudes towards poverty and those problems closely associated with poverty in the early and mid-nineteenth-century city–filth and disease. Using sanitary reform as a convenient way to describe that nexus of poverty, filth, and disease, Scarborough argues that Dickens effectively created sympathy for marginalized characters by drawing on both sanitary and animal welfare discourses. As Scarborough explains in the context of Dickens's sketch "The Seven Dials," Dickens could manipulate emotional responses to suffering animals "to express the [End Page 112] dilemmas in which the urban poor often became ensnared" (25). In an introduction and five chapters, Scarborough unfolds the rhetorical analysis, looking closely at a few of Dickens's early sketches and four major novels. The decision not to consider Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend is made in the interest of drawing attention to novels less commonly discussed in the context of sanitary reform and of engaging with "the more experimental stages of Dickens's attitudes toward the subject" (x). In a pattern that Scarborough adheres to throughout the book, Chapter 1 opens with a close reading of an article from a general-interest periodical, in which an overt discussion of animal life becomes an occasion for reflections on human poverty and the filthy urban environment. The article Scarborough uses in the first chapter, "List of the Animals in the Gardens of the Zoological Society," from the Quarterly Review, 1836, frames his discussion of several of Dickens's early sketches. In close readings of "Gin Shops," "A Little Talk about Spring, and the Sweeps," and other pieces, Scarborough traces the way Dickens deploys zoological discourses "to tap the conscience […] of the swiftly growing reading public" (11). Scarborough's idea is that in a changing context of animal-human relations, sympathy for one group could be used to develop sympathy for the other. So, for instance, in the case of the chimney-sweeps, Dickens likens the kindly feelings towards sweeps generated by fanciful legends and lore to the kindly (and self-interested) feelings towards animals effected by theories of the transmigration of souls. Scarborough identifies a similar dynamic in Oliver Twist, the focus of Chapter 2. The animal in question is Bill Sikes's hard-used but loyal dog Bull's-eye, who for Scarborough functions as a mediating figure between wary nineteenth-century readers and the socially unacceptable figure of Nancy. Both are "loyal subjects dedicated to the abusive master" (54), but as Scarborough argues, the sympathy that Dickens hopes to cultivate for Nancy can be felt...